Activism and Policy: Prospects for Change in Turkmenistan

Introduction

DEVIN STEWART: This is a Carnegie New Leaders program. If you haven't
heard about our program, please check it out. There are about 10-12 main events
a year, as well as a social aspect. We also go down to Washington, D.C., occasionally
to take part in task forces and special projects from time to time.

This is the last event of the program year, before the summer starts
and we are going to start organizing for fall programming. So I'm glad you could
make it.

Today we are going to hear on "Activism and Policy: Prospects for Change
in Turkmenistan." Given a lot of the hope that activism, NGOs and the civil society world could effect change from the outside in,
this topic is extremely interesting.

I'm going to turn it right over to one of our Carnegie New Leaders, Masha Feiguinova.
She is a program coordinator at the Open Society Institute. Masha put this panel together today. Thank you very much,
Masha.
MASHA FEIGUINOVA: Thanks very much.

Thank you to the Carnegie Council for hosting the event. It's the first one
that I've had the pleasure of organizing as a New Leader. It's nice to see how
the program works from the participatory aspect.

As Devin mentioned, I'm a program coordinator at the Open Society Institute.
I focus specifically on Turkmenistan.

Open Society is a private U.S. foundation operating globally. In Turkmenistan
we have been working since 1995 to provide more legal and financial services
to grassroots initiatives, mainly, that protect and foster civil and political
rights. We also in our grant-making prioritize public health, access to information,
and education.

We also promote efforts outside the country through Diaspora
groups, to publicize abuses that take place in the country that has
made this country notorious for its human rights record, and also a core business
and diplomatic partner for the United States and for the European Union.

In this capacity, we work with groups like Farid Tuhbatullin'sTurkmen Initiative
for Human Rights, and we support their ability to gather independent, reliable
information on the current state of human rights in Turkmenistan.

In addition to direct support that we provide through grant-making, OSI also
supports independent media and scholarship on pressing concerns around the world.

It's a pleasure to have Alexander Cooley here with us. Alex is a professor of
international relations at Barnard College at Columbia. He is also currently
a global fellow at Open Society Institute, researching the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation and its activities in Central Asia.

The good people at the fellowship program have asked me to put a plug in for the
program. I'll just say a few words.

It's really an asset to our organization, and the fellowship program is open
to all. It's designed to bring outstanding practitioners in a variety of fields,
including journalism, activists, and scholars, into the OSI community to broaden our own thinking and to question our own assumptions
on the work that we do and to help us better understand the pivotal problems.

Before I turn it over to the presenters, the goal of this presentation is to think
about how civil society activism, diplomatic leverage, and commercial
interest can help to create a more open and more democratic society that is
better able to respect human rights.

In the context of this conversation, we are using Turkmenistan as a case study,
but these dynamics can apply to many countries around the world. As I understand
it, one of the goals of the leadership program is to foster these dialogues internationally.

With that said, I will turn it over to Farid Tuhbatullin.

Remarks

FARID TUHBATULLIN [through interpreter]: Thank you very much for coming
and thank you for your interest.

Turkmenistan is a former Soviet republic in Central Asia. It borders Uzbekistan,
Iran, and Afghanistan.

Turkmenistan is famous in the world for two things. The second thing that it
is famous for is its reserves of natural gas. The first thing that it is famous
for is its one-time president Saparmurat
Niyazov.

Niyazov became the leader of Turkmenistan in 1985 and headed the country until
the end of 2006. The system that Niyazov created in the country is a classic
example of a totalitarian state with a personality cult.

There is no opposition in Turkmenistan, nor is there any independent media.
The education system, which is based on the study of Niyazov's book, the Ruhnama,
as well as the media, have been transformed into propaganda tools.

At the beginning of the period of independence, there were independent activists
who were working under tremendous pressure. After an attempt on Niyazov's
life in 2002, activity by the NGOs became virtually impossible and ground to
a halt.

When I was still living in Turkmenistan, my colleagues and I engaged
in letter-writing campaigns, at the very least on environmental issues. We wrote
to local authorities and the government authorities in Ashgabat, the
capital, and we did achieve some results.

Some of the activists who were obliged to leave Turkmenistan were able to continue
their activities from abroad and have some impact through such organizations
as the United Nations, the European Union, the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and affect government
decisions in Turkmenistan through those bodies.

But of course that activity
is not really capable of achieving major changes in the country, because the
system which was created by Türkmenbasy
[title meaning "head of all Turkmens"] Niyazov is a harsh system, though rather stable, and he was president for life.

However, his president life term expired in 2006 [when he died]. He was succeeded as president
by Gurbanguly
Berdimuhamedow, who announced education and agricultural reforms, lifted
the prohibition on the Internet, and also resumed paying pensions and social
support, such as welfare and unemployment.

It's now three and a half years since Berdimuhamedow succeeded Türkmenbasy
as president, so we've had enough time to assess the reforms that he introduced.

It's clear that they have not been very effective. The main reason for that
is that their purpose was not really to effect significant change, but simply
to show that he was going to be a better president than his predecessor.

He announced educational reforms. But it's clear that the purpose of education
remains not the transmission of knowledge to young people, but rather to brainwash them.

There are very few people who have access to the Internet, and websites which
have information about Turkmenistan are blocked.

As was the case when Niyazov was president, tremendous sums are spent on construction
projects for luxury hotels, palaces, and other facilities which do not pay for
themselves. These projects do not create jobs and, according to the data that
we have, the unemployment rate in Turkmenistan stands at 60 percent.

Turkmenistan remains the most closed country in the world, or one of the most
closed countries in the world. It is very hard to get in or out of the country.

Residents of Turkmenistan are not allowed to subscribe to the foreign press.
And it has been many years now since the government ceased registering civic
organizations and NGOs, and without registration those organizations cannot
operate.

The small number of activists who remain in the country and who are continuing
to operate as activists are persecuted. They are followed. Their families and
those who support them are persecuted. They are put in prison, psychiatric hospitals, or forced out of the country.

In the grand scheme of things, the situation under the new president
is not all that different from what it was under Niyazov. It hasn't changed.

One difference between the way things were under Niyazov and the
way they are now is that Niyazov was an orphan. He had no relatives that he could appoint
to senior positions.

Berdimuhamedow, to the contrary, has many relatives, many
of whom are in positions of power and have been appointed senior officials.
In addition to that, his relatives, who are referred to collectively all as
"nephews," although they're not all exactly nephews, have seized a
lot of the most successful businesses in Turkmenistan.

This is a sensitive situation,
because when a private business is taken over this way it has an impact not
only on the businessmen but also on the income of the members of the secret
services. The reason for that is that the secret services used to engage in
shakedowns of private businesses; they used to essentially rob them. If
these businesses are being taken over by the president's relatives, that means
that the secret services lose an income stream.

Most members of the secret services are loyal to the current government simply
and only because the government accords them certain privileges. If they lose
those privileges, then they lose all interest in protecting that government.

So the situation in Turkmenistan is coming to resemble
the situation which reigned in Kyrgyzstan under Bakiyev, when he had many relatives
who were in positions of power, not only in the government but in profitable
private business.

I do think that the people of Turkmenistan are probably more patient than those
of Kyrgyzstan. But we are talking about a situation where power is becoming
more concentrated, not simply in one tribe in the country, but in a
single clan, which is a much smaller grouping.

It is in the interests of President Berdimuhamedow to establish
things in a way that is consonant with the rule of law and encourage civil,
community, and religious organizations to flourish and engage in
their legal activities. When these organizations are forced to operate
underground, then they break the law, and that is not in anybody's interest.

Recently Berdimuhamedow announced that there was going to be a multi-party system
in Turkmenistan. He even announced what other party was going to be created
and gave orders as to what kind of work that party was going to do.

That is to say that, multi-party announcements to the contrary notwithstanding,
the situation will be very similar to what it was before, with quasi-NGOs and
now quasi-political parties. In other words, the government is going to force
civic activity onto an illegal basis.

So the reforms that Berdimuhamedow announced and which he is trying to implement—I
don't know if he's actually trying to implement them or whether it's window
dressing—but they all point to the fact that the system that was created
by Niyazov cannot be reformed; it can only be broken so that you can build something.

Thank you.
ALEXANDER COOLEY: Thank you to Masha and Farid.

I want to talk a little bit about the international context that Turkmenistan
finds itself in. If we ask ourselves, "What are the prospects for the international
community effecting change or the prospects of international agents, such as
international organizations or nongovernmental organizations or foundations,
making an impact?" I think we have to have the greater international picture
in mind.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to say that the picture is a favorable one for
the forces of change and liberalization in Turkmenistan.

Farid's analysis that this is one of the most closed societies in the
world is correct. Societies that are this closed also bring their own
sets of further problems. Sometimes the tactics that you can use in
certain semi-open or authoritarian societies—tactics like naming and changing,
for instance, or posting things on the Internet—don't have the same degree of bite or effectiveness, as they
would in a place like Kyrgyzstan or perhaps Kazakhstan.

These kinds of special category of totalitarian or extreme
authoritarian societies bring their own challenges, just because we can't even
get the agents in there to use our levers that we traditionally have. Some of
you may well know this first-hand.

I teach international relations at Barnard and at the Harriman
Institute at Columbia, and I was also a member of the Harriman Institute
educational delegation that was invited to go to Ashgabat twice over the last
couple of years. So some of these impressions are quite anecdotal. Some are
backed up by what specialists like Farid have pointed to, and I'll get to those
towards the end of my comments.

In terms of the international context, Turkmenistan finds itself the center
of competition over its energy sources. That's really the bottom line. Turkmenistan
is estimated to have either the third, the fourth, or the fifth, depending on
whom you talk to, largest reserves of natural gas in the world.

The big obstacle until now in terms of international consumers and companies
was Turkmenistan's reliance on the old Soviet-Russian pipeline network. So what
the geopolitical game has been about is building new pipelines and creating
new agreements to access Turkmen gas and route it to markets.

Those of you in the business community familiar with the politics of natural
gas know that for the most part it requires fixed pipelines, unless
you're dealing in LNG
[liquified natural gas]. But fixed pipelines mean that once they're
set, they become a kind of a fixed, immovable asset.

So pipeline politics
is more important than in the case of oil, where we have a world oil market
and oil is relatively fungible and its price is determined. This maneuvering over pipelines and access to Turkmenistan's gas is really the
primary international context.

Who are the players here? Russia.

Russia does not want to see its traditional monopoly and access to Turkmen
gas broken. For Russia, Turkmenistan acts as kind of a supplier that tops off
Russian supplies. When demand in Europe is quite high, as it was up to 2007
before the financial crisis, Central Asian gas, and specifically Turkmen gas,
was key to Russian companies, specifically Gazprom,
being able to fulfill their commitment to the European market.

Another player is the European Union, particularly a new energy project called
Nabucco.
Nabucco is a pipeline that will be built from the Caspian region across Turkey into eastern and central Europe. It has a terminal
at Baumgarten in Austria.

The key about this is that this pipeline is meant to bypass Russia (hence some
of the gymnastics of the route) and the European Union, in its
search for energy security, wants to avoid the problems of Russian disagreements
with Ukraine and Belarus, that held up supplies (hence its interest and support in Nabucco).

Who is going to supply gas in Nabucco?

We're not quite sure yet, but there is a big hope that Turkmenistan will
be a main supplier.

Recently, over the last months, it has become less equivocal
and talked about supplying quite a bit of gas there. Before it was a little
more reluctant. Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan will be the main Nabucco suppliers.
In the future, perhaps Iraq or Iran, but both of those countries have real political
problems to them.

Given the economic sanctions in Iran, it is unlikely that
the international consortium will allow Iranian gas in. Given the problems between
the northern region, the Kurds, and the central government in Iraq, it's unlikely.
But the United States is pushing for Iraqi gas to supply Nabucco. So if Nabucco
is ever to be built—and it's an over-10-billion-euro project and just keeps
getting higher—it will have to have some sort of guarantees for gas suppliers.

Members of the consortia, the six companies in Nabucco, say that Turkmenistan
is ready to supply some of that gas. So that's the second actor.The third actor, and in my mind actually the most important actor, is the one
that we don't talk as much about: China.

During this whole back-and-forth talking about geopolitics of energy over
the last decade we have had an alternative route to Europe that bypasses Russia. The Chinese have built a pipeline from Turkmenistan to China,
going through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

And the pipeline was built on time. They first talked about it in 2003. Three
years of preparatory work, and it was built in three years. Companies that are
accustomed to building pipelines in countries like Sudan find Turkmenistan to
be a similar kind of environment. So the Chinese have been very effective and
quiet. This is the first major pipeline from Central Asia that bypasses Russia.

Part of this engagement has also involved Chinese loans to Turkmenistan. An
over $4 billion loan was made in exchange for more investments in a new field there,
as well as investments in gas-related types of production.

Also, there has been some interesting movement in the area of security
cooperation. For instance, China has transferred its Internet censoring technology
to Turkmenistan. All the Internet cyber cafes that have been opened by President
Berdimuhamedow are now being monitored by filtering software provided by Beijing.

So the Chinese-Turkmen relationship is broad, and is quite interesting
and important, even though it's under the radar.

The point about this is that the United States also supports Nabucco. It supports
the strengthening of ties. In the previous administration, the strengthening
of ties away from Russia was quite explicit. So any project that weaned the
Central Asian post-Soviet states away from Russia was viewed as good for the
United States. Things are a little more complicated now.

There are three main interests for the United States in Turkmenistan:

One is to try and encourage these alternate pipelines to Europe.

The second is that U.S. big businesses have some commercial interest in
the country. Boeing supplies aircraft to Turkmenistan. You have agricultural
equipment and machinery made by Caterpillar or John Deere, and they are big
customers and players in Turkmenistan. You have a new Turkmen-U.S. Business
Council that has also been created as a result. In fact, Assistant Secretary
Blake
was in Ashgabat with some business leaders recently, leading a dialogue there.

Thirdly, Turkmenistan is a relatively unacknowledged part of the logistics
campaign in the war in Afghanistan. We have quiet gas-and-go operations in Ashgabat. Also, some of the subcontractors for fuel in Bagram buy from Turkmen suppliers—again very quietly, but it is going
on.

So those are the common U.S. positions.

China and Russia don't particularly care about the state of governance or state
of affairs in Turkmenistan. We can imagine that.

But how do the European Union
and the United States manage this tension between their commercial interests and the kind of human rights/democracy deficits that you
see in Turkmenistan? This is a real challenge for both the European Union and
the United States. Interests have tended to trump the normative issues.

The European Union especially still thinks of itself as a normative actor. One of the things that it has done in its EU-Central Asia policy, which was
led by the German chairmanship in 2007, was to create different categories of
engagement with Turkmenistan. "We want to engage with Turkmenistan over
energy, over rule of law, and create dialogues about civil society concerns." So you have an EU bilateral dialogue with Turkmenistan.

Under the Obama
Administration, we've actually set up something very similar. It is a sort of
working group that meets twice a year with each Central Asian country, in which
a broad array of issues are supposedly addressed.

The problem with the dialogues of both the EU and U.S. side, for those who are
skeptical of these forums, is that they kind of circumscribe the democracy and
governance issues. There's almost a "Well, business leaders don't have to
talk about these because we have the dialogues," or "The Energy
Forum is not the place to bring these up because we have the dialogues." The dialogues are a welcome addition, but they also have these dual
functions that critics point out.

I am running out of time, so let me just make another couple of points.

One is in Turkmenistan it's not only a personality cult that you see—yes, that's part of it—but
there's just a lack of bureaucratic capacity and real bureaucratic fear about
job security and being on the wrong end of a lot of these cabinet reshuffles.

Berdimuhamedow has kept the practice of Niyazov of rotating his cabinet ministers
and deputy ministers on a regular basis so that no one gets too cozy, then ousting
them on grounds of failure or corruption, whatever grounds he pounces on. That
creates a culture of being very risk-averse or not wanting to do anything that
draws attention onto what you might be doing. I think that's another impediment
in terms of linking in with the international community.

Farid talked about security services. They have daily cabinet meetings, which
is rather bizarre. All sorts of things are brought up at the cabinet level that
just wouldn't be in a normal country. Questions about whom to give visas to
in terms of exchange students are brought up at the daily meeting. It's an indicator
of the degree of control that Farid is talking about.

The final issue I want to talk about is the lack of human capacity in Turkmenistan.
This is really the one thing that struck me as getting even worse.

For 20 years you've had an educational system that has been gutted, where students
have been forced to read the Ruhnama,
which was Niyazov's own philosophic treatise. Ruhnama education became compulsory
up to, I think, 30 hours at some point from 20.

It became compulsory for civil
servants. Even doctors would be tested on the Ruhnama rather than their medical
skill. But the accumulation of this is now showing its effects, and there is a
real lack of technical knowledge and expertise, as a result of this sort of Ruhnama-centered
education. The challenge now is that there is a real disconnect in a society
like this and how do you manage an external flow of information or ideas.

I'll leave you with one final recent example. Doctors
Without Borders was trying to do a public health survey of certain diseases
or practices in Turkmenistan. Their findings were very disturbing to Turkmen bureaucrats,
who had been accustomed to saying, "Everything is fine in our country."
So they got tossed out.

This is a culture where this lack of human capacity reinforces the theme that
knowledge is power, that even really basic things like statistics and data are
not for public consumption.

For all these reasons, we are facing real headwinds in attempts to promote change
in Turkmenistan.

I'd be happy to extend some thoughts about some strategies
and techniques to make headway. But you can't underestimate the international, domestic, and human challenges in tackling some of the issues that Farid
has brought up.

Thank you.

Questions and Answers

MASHA FEIGUINOVA: The situation that Farid has outlined is a country where
all NGOs are closed.

You basically have severed any dialogue between civil
society—between teachers that might have serious concerns about their students
learning 30 hours of ideological teaching as opposed to math. You don't have
dialogue between the press and the government about developments in the country.

There is little transparency of data, so the citizens of the country cannot
hold the government accountable for its funding, budgeting, or its allocation
of resources.

As Alex pointed out, Turkmenistan—we'll take the average number—has
the fourth-largest reserves in the world. It's a small country with only 5 million
people, and its revenue is about $1 billion a month, just from gas alone. For
5 million people it's quite a lot of money. But it's still living at a fairly
low level. This society doesn't really have a space to question it.

The question that I have to Farid is: What can either Turkmen or the international
watchdog community—NGOs, activists, etc.—do to influence the situation
for the better?

Then the question that I have for Alex is: What are the ethics of either governments'
diplomatic engagement?

The two choices are either engagement or isolation. You mentioned that the
U.S. delegation like the State Department just had the annual bilateral consultation
in Turkmenistan, with a diplomatic delegation of maybe seven people and a business
delegation of 43 people. So you can appreciate the level of interest. So what
do you do?

FARID TUHBATULLIN [through interpreter]: As I've already said, my colleagues and I who are abroad are seeking opportunities to have an impact on
the Turkmen authorities. Sometimes we have some success.

For example, in February we prepared a report on prison conditions in Turkmenistan.
In that report we included some recommendations for amendments to be made to
Turkmenistan law, specifically to the Criminal Code, to improve the situation.

Just a week after we sent our report to Turkmenistan to the president's administration,
he raised the issue in the Security Council. Of course, it appeared that this
idea was coming from him. But to us it makes no difference, as long as these
ideas are being advanced. As a result, there were changes introduced into the
Criminal Code and into other legislative acts.

On the other side, when there is heightened activity around a particular issue,
sometimes the result is pressure on our family and friends who are living in
Turkmenistan.

It is sometimes difficult to understand the logic and try and see some consistency
in the actions of the Turkmen leadership. But we don't have a lot of different
kinds of levers. We prepare shadow reports for various bodies of the United
Nations, and this is the way that we try to make a difference.

Unfortunately, in the post-Niyazov era the Turkmen opposition which was abroad
has somehow lost its optimism and has become less active. So sometimes we have
to take on tasks that should be handled by the political opposition.

That's how things are.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Can you say a few words about the government angle
and then a few words about the business angle, in terms of Masha's question
on ethics here? It is very difficult.

But, number one, I think both Brussels and Washington can't fall into the trap
of thinking that somehow they have the mechanisms or levers to out-compete Russia
or China when it comes to cutting corners on governance or democracy
issues. They can't offer the kinds of private benefits,
legally anyway, to the Turkmen leadership as these other countries can.

And so the question is: What can you do? That is where I think especially the
European Union has to have more faith in the kind of normative power that it
stands for.

Countries like Turkmenistan actually do need the European Union, if only to
play the European Union off of Russia and China, so they're not sandwiched in
between. I think Brussels especially really sells itself short on the kind of
transformative actor it can be by putting a lot of these concerns, not in the
working dialogues, but out in the public sphere. It's really the public sphere
that counts here.

In terms of the business angle, this is harder. But the question for activists
in the most egregious examples is to raise the costs and profiles of businesses
doing their work in Turkmenistan, and ask them to consider all
aspects of this relationship and whether it's worth the reputational risks that
they run of being affiliated with the regime.

I'll give you a recent example. Daimler
was just fined by the U.S. government $90 million in civil penalties for
violations of bribery statutes. You know, it's a mark there.

Similarly, the French company Bouygoes,
which has built a lot of white elephants and big projects in Ashgabat, has removed from its website references to Turkmenistan. They used to
be quite prominent. Why did they do this? Because of the negative publicity that they have received.

Yes, business is business. But when you think of business in a more global context, sometimes these types of campaigns are bad for business, especially
if a particular company is associated with really harsh or egregious sorts of
regimes.

I would say that can cut both ways in terms of global activism.

Finally, let me just make one point here on this very interesting analogy to
the events in Kyrgyzstan.

The situations are different, but I think one similarity
is that in both the United States and in the European Union we have come to
use the code word of "stability" to justify our engagement with authoritarian
regimes. "Well, we're really interested in stability." But really, who's
interested in instability?

The one thing that Kyrgyzstan shows is that that's actually a false choice.
The causes of the regime
collapse in Kyrgyzstan were really governance issues. The people who protested
in Naryn and
Bishkek and
brought down the government were protesting against corruption
in the electricity sector.

Is the situation analogous in Turkmenistan? Maybe. Maybe not.

My point is
we can't use stability as a synonym for authoritarianism. Authoritarian practice
in and of itself is not evidence of stability. We've slipped into that, and
both Washington and Brussels have conflated it to dealing with Central Asia
broadly over the last two years. That's a mistake that we need to pull back
on and take these trends seriously in these countries that over time stack up
and lead to a real kind of mess in their social fabric and institutions.

QUESTION: I wanted to ask you for more background on the students who
were banned. Who made the decision about that? Were they attempting to send
a message to America or to Kyrgyzstan or both? Was it about color revolutions
or was it about other regional extremist movements that they feared?

The recent
events in Osh revealed that in fact there were several hundred Turkmen students
there, even despite all this business with the refuseniks.
It then turned out also that there's no consular representation from Turkmenistan
in Kyrgyzstan. So I was wondering what the history of that was, why they fear
the Kyrgyz angle so much, and how you see this?

If you look around in constituencies for change, there really aren't any, except
students and foreign diplomats. People like [Turkmen Foreign Minister] Sheikh Muradov played a role,
and the ex-pats and the Diaspora played a role. That's obviously why they have
cracked down. But I just wondered do you see that constituency having been
defeated, or will we see it appear again in some form? And what was the regime
really up to with that?

Finally, do you have any more information of whether the United States
has raised this issue? In the talks last week, they didn't publicly say
anything about that issue, even though its students are going to U.S.-funded
programs.
MASHA FEIGUINOVA: I'm going to ask either Cathy or Farid to sum up the student
situation that Cathy is referring to, for the uninitiated. Do you want to say
just a few words just for the people who don't know?
QUESTIONER: What happened was last fall several hundred students were literally about
to board planes. They already had visas in hand and they were going
to various institutions abroad, including the American
University in Central Asia; there was a Kazakhstan management program that
some were going to and other universities abroad. They were stopped on the tarmac
and prevented from leaving. The Ministry of Education suddenly said they needed
to have extra paperwork and validation, even though they had already been granted
the required exit visas there.

There was a lot of back-and-forth with this for some weeks. The United States
was trying to quietly intervene. The university itself was trying
to get the students there. They let through a few of them, but then some of
them they rerouted into Russian programs that were completely not in their field.
Let's say if they were in the humanities, they'd be asked if they wanted to
go to an oil institute or something. I guess that's how it worked.

So clearly somebody got the idea in the ministries. I would say it would probably
be the president himself, because that's how everything is done. The Ministry
of Education and the Security Ministry, decided they could not have these students
go abroad. So
they didn't. They're still in limbo.

That was what my question really was, to figure out what happened to those people,
what their future is.

FARID TUHBATULLIN [through translator]: Right now, thanks to the fact
that there has been a hullaballoo about the situation and some fairly senior
people have gotten involved, the situation is being resolved.

There was mention just now of a delegation that was in Turkmenistan recently.
I met with some members of that delegation right before they left for Turkmenistan,
with Michael
Posner, who is from the State Department. I gave him the name of one student
who has still been unable to leave.

Her name is Madina Alieva. There are a lot of students who are in that
situation. But what was finally agreed upon was that this one student's name
would be mentioned in the meetings. Mr. Posner of the State Department agreed
to raise the issue about the students generally and to mention Madina specifically.
He also promised me that when he got back from the trip he and I would meet
again. That meeting has not yet taken place.

Unfortunately, Madina has not yet been able to leave the country. I think that
there are at least 20 students from that group who have not been able to leave
yet of the ones whom I know.

The reason that many Turkmen students are trying to obtain foreign education
is very simple. There are about 100,000 high school graduates every year in
Turkmenistan and only 12,000 of them are able to be accepted into Turkmen institutes
of higher education. Of those who don't have that opportunity, even if only
half of them want to go on to college, they have to leave the country.

Higher education is much less expensive in Kyrgyzstan than it is in Russia or
in Kazakhstan, and for that reason there is a large number of Turkmen students
who are studying in Kyrgyzstan. And of course, the authorities are probably
very frightened that those students are going to learn to be like the Kyrgyz
students and participate in revolutionary activities.
QUESTION: I guess this would be directed to Professor Cooley. Do you see
any role being played by the Turkmen coming to the United States or to the European
Union for undergraduate or graduate universities; and, if so, what would that
role be?
ALEXANDER COOLEY: You mean role in reshaping Turkmen society?

QUESTIONER: Yes.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: I think the problem is one of access. One conversation
I was having earlier was the contrast between Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, which
has always struck me as quite instructive. In Kazakhstan you have had the Bolashak
program, which is now privatized. It used to be a state-funded project, which
would place thousands of Kazakh students in leading universities both in Europe
and in the States.

I remember one year at the beginning of the decade we had at one meeting
something like 13 or 14 Bolashak fellows at Columbia. We had a lunch for them.
They were everywhere—business school, law school, policy, and so forth.

In exchange for doing this, they would go back to Turkmenistan and do government service
for about five years under this kind of implicit contract that they had.

This sort of experience gives you the technical skills, but
also the perspective about global norms and your home country's place there.

I think the Kazakhs could be doing a lot more with the human capital and the
resources that they have in order to be true leaders in the region. But that's a different
story.

Qualitatively, it's much different. You see a kind of an evolution, an
internalization of what is being absorbed outside. We're not even at that point
in Turkmenistan now.

One of the fears is not only that students that study abroad will incite these
Kyrgyz-style revolutions and instability, but also that they won't return to
the country. This is a problem.

Why go back to Turkmenistan and have to work
yourself up these crazy bureaucratic clan kinds of structures when you can just
try to get a job with a multinational corporation outside and earn a good salary
there? Again, that's a particular problem of a very closed type of society.

So in theory, yes, it probably could have an impact over the long term. Just
as this has hollowed out slowly, it has to be rebuilt slowly. But there's a
lot of concern that these educational programs are security risks as much as
they are education programs. At least that's the way the Turkmen security services see
it.

On the question of how this happened, the working rumor that I heard on
this was that in fact this was not an initiative of the education minister.
It was that he was asked at one of these cabinet meetings, "Just how many
Turkmen students are going abroad this year?" and he blanked, and didn't
have an answer.

So then that led to a sort of a cataloguing of them all, when
they couldn't find anyone who had the information about this, and counting up
the visas. It then turned into a whole question of: Where are all of these people going? We don't have a clue what they're studying, where they are;
and then these distinctions being made over English-language programs.

So I think actually the education minister was out of the loop. Because he was
out of the loop, it became a national kind of crisis. He has since been fired.

QUESTION: The reason I asked about the message to the United States is
because at the same time they also didn't let the Peace Corps in. We don't know a lot of what the U.S. relations are because they are pretty quiet
when they deal with them. They don't even have an ambassador, which seems strange.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Right. I was about to say that. It works both ways. We have sent signals that we're particularly interested in engaging with
them. And then this ambassador role, that has been taken with some offense
in Ashgabat. That's a real snub. Charge d'Affaires Dick
Miles I think is one of the most capable diplomats we have, period. But
in terms of the title, not being ambassador.

The other thing that annoys Turkmen authorities is when U.S. officials
in the previous administration waltzed into Ashgabat and started lecturing
them about where to build their pipelines. That sort of exasperated
them and led them to think, "Who are you to dictate to us whether we should
be building Nabucco or doing this or doing that?"

It's the combination of fear of instability and this kind of didactic sort
of style that some—I won't name names—adopted towards them.

There's also a newfound self-confidence. One of the things that you see post
Niyazov is a lot of groups and organizations courting the Turkmen. They
are quite happy about this and use that as prima facie evidence that
things are okay.

Everyone's interested in educational cooperation with them and
wants to start up projects. So they feel a little better about
this honeymoon period, that they have a lot of potential suitors, which proves
that they're doing just fine, that the reforms are working, and that they are
in fact having the sort of desired effect.

QUESTION: I have two questions.

To Mr. Tuhbatullin, you mentioned that
you write alternative reports to the UN mechanism. What do you think the effects
are of using the UN bodies and the means that they provide for providing a voice
from the civil society? Secondly, what would you expect from global NGOs or
civil society organizations in terms of providing a voice or view
on what is happening in Turkmenistan to make sure that change can happen and
to support the local initiatives that are happening?

To Professor Cooley, you talked a little bit about the ethics of the business
community, and what you can expect. You also talked about the incentive of
reputational risks. Could you talk more about what incentives you
think could be reasonably expected and what actors you think would provide
a way for us to get there?

Thank you.

FARID TUHBATULLIN: Yes, we do do shadow reports and the UN committees
do use them. Our most recent one was for CEDAW
[the Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women].
Before that we prepared a report on national minorities.

These reports provide an alternative source of information. They are regarded
as reliable within these committees. In their resolutions and in their documents
they often raise issues which they have gotten from reading our reports.

However, the fact that these UN committees don't have a way of having a significant
impact on the countries, and that Turkmenistan, for example, can reject decisions
which it doesn't like, is another problem.

Your second question had to do with NGOs. As an example, on my organization's website, a forum took shape and an idea appeared on that forum. Some young people within
Turkmenistan, whom we didn't know at all, decided to start collecting information
inside the country about what was going on.

This group of young people started collecting email addresses of friends and
friends of friends, and in four months, they have built up a network of 700
email addresses, and those people are receiving information from us and from
other organizations about what's going on inside the country.

What that points to, first of all, is that there is a great interest in information.
The second thing, which is very important, is that from among those 700 people
who want to have information and who are not afraid, we can foster and train
people to become activists and work for us. That's what we're working on now.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: I think the key to any kind of corporate reputational
campaign is to link the presence of a company to some practice that violates
an international widely regarded norm or that inflicts some sort of bodily harm
or goes so against the grain of what's accepted in international society. That's
why the Internet campaigns against Gap sweatshop conditionshave been
so effective.

Think about the Cotton
Campaign in Uzbekistan. The idea of Uzbek cotton being dependent on a set
of practices that violate the human rights of minors by collectively forcing
them to go into the fields and pick cotton for two or three months a year. That's very effective too. We have this standard norm against child labor practices.

So the key is to identify companies with a specific impact in Turkmen society
that would be violating that kind of strong sense of international norm. Maybe
you could do it for some and not for others.

The campaign against Bouygues was partially the result of a couple of documentary
filmsthat came out publicizing them as building marble palaces for this
kind of crazy man. You had a visual image that you could connect. You need
similar types of connections to be made.

It might be more difficult to do with Boeing. But if you can link agricultural
machinery with certain social practices, then maybe you can do it.

The key for activists is to find those kinds of narratives and create those kinds of connections that are going to resonate internationally.

QUESTION: Do you feel there has been a benefit from the Chinese investment?
For investment going forward, do you think that represents a greater opportunity
for social uprising, or do you think that there is a risk to political stability?

ALEXANDER COOLEY: It's a very interesting question. I wish I knew. It's too early to be able to tell. We don't even know the extent of what's
in the package.

On the one hand, revenues as a result of this are potentially going to double
for the Turkmen government as they start selling 30 bcn, then go to 40 bcn,
and it's going to be higher than what they do to Russia. You have about 10,000 Turkmen who make a lot of money off of
this, and you have millions who have utilities subsidized, and who are kept
in a state of sort of depoliticization. It's not Kuwait where everyone is wealthy.
There is a small elite that gains the most out of it.

But on the other hand,
it is enough to keep them demobilized. So inasmuch as there are more revenues
to spread about, then maybe it sort of demobilizes them.

Now, the other thing about Chinese investment is it comes with strange types
of repayment schedules and expectations. This is what all the Central
Asian countries are dealing with now. The question of what does China want out
of this in 20, 25 years' time?

It's more unclear in Turkmenistan than the other areas, because from Turkmenistan
it just wants the gas; all the other stuff, all the broad relationships, are
vehicles towards ensuring a steady supply of gas. Whereas with the other ones
it wants border stability, certain parts of land back,cooperation
on security issues and so forth in Xinjiang.

From Chinese strategic thinking, because you only want the energy, you have
to make sure that your contacts are broad enough that that relationship becomes
indispensable.

It's sort of the opposite of what we did with the Manas
base for us. We started talking to Kyrgyz only about the base and now the interim
government is very upset with us. Whereas the Chinese, even if they want the
fix, they try and broaden contacts so as to make their kind of partnership indispensable
going forward. But whether they provide a general level of public goods in Turkmenistan
that's appreciated, I don't know.

One final thought on this. There was a very interesting report that I never
saw—maybe Farid knows more about it—about a conflict between Turkmen
workers and Chinese management on the pipeline. It was in September.

Apparently,
about a dozen Chinese managers were hospitalized. This was all resolved very
quietly and diplomatically. Whether that's an indication of potential tensions
I don't know. The Chinese workers that come in tend to be quite sequestered
and separate from the localities in which they are operating.
QUESTION: In order to try and leverage and oil and gas interests, there
has to even be a stake in the first place. It seems to me the trade balance
between the United States and Turkmenistan is only like $200 million,
right above Togo. There isn't a stake and there isn't the willingness of the
European Union to spend $4 billion in a soft loan.

It works two ways. The Turkmens have been coquettish, but they also haven't
heard a deal or an offer.

It seems to me like the European Union is also split, because you have the Italians.
Eni is more gravitated
towards the Russian projects; they even see themselves as making some kind of
hybrid between something that might satisfy some Nabucco and
some South
Stream. Just looking at it from afar, it seems that the
European Union hasn't really ponied up the deal for the Turkmens. That's why
they don't have a deal.

And the Turkmens gravitate towards whoever can drop money on them, which is
also the Iranians. The Iranians are offering to buy more. So I just wondered
if that's how you see it and whether you see that changing at all in the next
five years.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: I don't have much to add to that. You've described
it perfectly. Europe tends to have a lot of conferences on oil and natural gas
in Eurasia, and the Chinese build pipelines while they're having conferences.
It's a simple as that.

EU machinations are very slow and deliberate. They're getting there. It seems
that there's a little more movement now on Nabucco. RWE
has made a statement now "this pipeline is going to be built starting this
summer." We'll wait and see.

But even aside from all that, Nabucco is a very small amount of gas for EU energy
needs, so all this kind of fuss and courting of the Turkmens and back-and-forth is for what's just a small fraction of European needs.

Not only that, but we have seen tremendous technological breakthroughs in
the last year in shale gas technology that is going to make the United States
the leading gas producer. We're going to start exporting this year as a result.

As well as secondary effects. LNG that was coming to the States instead went
to Europe, and created a spot market for liquid natural gas. Then, all of a
sudden Gazprom had to give in and sell a fifth of its gas, when it said it never
would do that, at the spot market for LNG.

There are these technological innovations too that I think will potentially
give Europe a lot more bargaining leverage in how they deal with Eurasian energy
producers than they think they have at the moment. But let's not get into the
psychology of it.
MASHA FEIGUINOVA: I really appreciate people coming to this event. I realize
that Turkmenistan is in a way an obscure case, only in that not that many people
know about the country.

It is a really
strong example of why protection of basic civic and political rights is incredibly
crucial. It's one of those things that you don't miss them until they're gone.
I hope we've been able to demonstrate what happens to the country when there
is a complete absence of those.

It is also a good example of the kind of issues that we are going to have to
start thinking about more, primarily in terms of how do you engage with an incredibly
repressive regime that has something that you want very badly (in this case
gas) or have convinced yourself that is incredibly needed.

These are the questions that we will have to be thinking about over the next
20, 30, 40 plus years. I hope we have been able to stir your imagination in
that respect.